It’s 108 degrees outside, and not much cooler in the dusty red cargo van. The air conditioner doesn’t work. The windows are rolled down as far as they’ll go. The breeze generated from the van’s speed doesn’t really help, just stirs the air around a bit, like soup. We’re embarking on a 40-mile expanse of highway in central California called the Grapevine—an unforgiving stretch that has no exits and no cell reception as it corkscrews through the mountains.

It’s dawning on me that I may have made a terrible mistake. Getting into a van with a stranger you met on the Internet is never a good idea, but in this case, there are unique risks. The man behind the wheel, Peter, is a quadriplegic.

I’m not scared of Peter. I’m scared of what he may be unable to do, which is to continue driving. It’s possible he will pass out, lose control of the van, and kill us both. I have to keep stopping myself from offering to take over. I haven’t the slightest clue as to how to drive this thing.

“You need to stay hydrated,” I tell him, feeling for the bottle of Poland Spring I’d put at my feet when we began our journey hours before, in the foggy deep blue of the early morning. The bottle is hot now, the plastic soft and crinkly. I hold it up in offering. Peter doesn’t see my gesture. “Water?” I say.

“Yes, please,” he says. “Thank you.” That he is still being so polite makes me feel worse. This dear man is going to drop dead at any minute and his last words will have been ones of sincere gratitude to me, the person who got him into this mess.

I hold the bottle between my knees and fumble to peel the paper off one of the straws lying around inside the glove compartment. My hands are shaking, and I’m mad at them and then I’m mad at myself for being mad at my hands. “It’s really warm,” I warn, leaning over to him.

“It will have to do for now, can you hold it for me, please?”

More than 20 years ago, when he was 19, he dove headfirst into a too-shallow lake. His spinal cord snapped between his fifth and sixth vertebrae.

“Yes, yes,” I say, fanning away the ‘please.’ I know the drill. It had been the same with the coffee that morning. The bottle is trickier because it’s so long and narrow. The straw just barely peeks out at the top. I have to get very close to Peter’s mouth, stretching the seatbelt all the way. Some of the water spills over, splashing his cheeks and chin, dripping down his neck. He takes big, get-it-while-you-can gulps, wincing at the unnatural taste from the plastic. He nods when finished, and I put the bottle in the cup holder.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know it would get so hot.”

“It’s okay,” Peter says.

He doesn’t look at me while he’s driving, not even the briefest of side-glances when we’re on a deserted patch of road. It’s something he warned me about when I first got into the car, but I still keep forgetting, interpreting it as an expression of anger or a sign that he isn’t interested in what I’m saying, especially now that things aren’t going so well. When I remember he can’t move his neck, that he can’t move most of his body, I feel bad for having forgotten.

More than 20 years ago, when Peter was 19, he dove headfirst into a too-shallow lake. His spinal cord snapped between his fifth and sixth vertebrae. Peter has no ability to move or feel his legs, and has extremely limited mobility in both arms. What mobility he does have took years of practice to acquire.

Because the break was worse on the lower left side of his spine, the effects of the damage are more pronounced throughout Peter’s right. He can move his left bicep, triceps, and wrist. His left shoulder has the broad, squared-off look befitting the 6’2” man that he is, while his right shoulder dips down lifelessly. Though he has some mobility in his right shoulder, the rest of the arm attached to it is incapable of motion. Aside from the left wrist—which he describes as a lifesaver—Peter has no mobility in either hand. His fingers are folded, pads to palm, as though he’s loosely cupping a handful of crumbs, forever on the verge of releasing them.

Though I’d only met Peter in person that morning, I’d known him for a few months. We’d been chatting on Facebook after having been introduced online by a mutual friend. I was visiting L.A. for an indeterminate length of time, writing and living on savings while I cared for my mother who was recovering from a liver transplant. As often as possible I was making weekend trips up 170 miles north to see my father in Corcoran State Prison. A year or so prior, he’d been convicted of murder and sentenced to 19 years to life.

I had never mentioned this part of my life to Peter, until the night before a planned visit when my ride to the prison bailed (I don’t drive). I was running out of options, and suddenly I recalled Peter’s past offers to pick me up, how he’d added that he was perfectly able to drive. It was worth asking about. I thought Peter could be refreshing company. So often I dreaded the long somber drives to the prison, the struggle to be exceedingly polite to whomever was driving when I just wanted to be silent and alone, or talk about something that had nothing to do with the melancholy mission at hand. Peter and I would probably chat about books and movies, like we did online.

Hey Peter, are you free tomorrow? Wanna go on an adventure?

Sure, why not?

Here’s why not: I was essentially proposing the suckiest Saturday ever for Peter, who would have to pick me up at 6 a.m., drive me for three and a half hours to a desolate location, drop me off, then wait for another four hours while I visited with my dad, then drive me all the way back to L.A. I explained all this to him, and said I’d pay for gas and meals and give him $100, which was more than I could really afford. After a phony squabble, we settled on my just paying for gas and meals. He said he was looking forward to it and that despite the depressing circumstances we would find a way to have fun.

I didn’t have a mental image of the van I expected a quadriplegic to drive, but I assumed it would be interesting to experience. I assumed it would be like no other van I’d ever been in.

The van has blind spots, but Peter can't turn his neck to see around them.

Peter drives a Ford E-200 Econoline cargo van. It’s an industrial, no-frills vehicle that looks like something a rock band on a malnourished budget would use for touring. Back when he bought it in 1999, it had cost him an additional $25,000 to have it customized to accommodate his manual wheelchair (a style he prefers to the recommended automatic because it requires him to challenge and thus strengthen whatever use he has in his arms). The van features a motorized lift, a lock-down function so the chair doesn’t roll away from the steering wheel, and a lever system that substitutes for the gas and brake pedals. To steer, Peter places his hands onto joystick-like placeholders, and by rotating his shoulder can spin the wheel effortlessly—a system called “zero effort steering.”

But sometimes the van has a devilish mind of its own. There have been times when the lock-down function has given out, and Peter has simply rolled away from the steering wheel while in traffic unable to stop until crashing into something. Or when it has refused to unlock and Peter has been trapped inside, calling on friends and sometimes even random passersby to help free him. The motorized lift can be a pain. You just have to keep trying.

It wasn’t until getting into the van that I learned that like any vehicle, the van has blind spots, but Peter can’t turn his neck to see around them. It’s the passenger's duty to check for oncoming traffic during a lane switch. Without one, Peter changes lanes blind. I scoped the road at every lane change. Even then there were some close calls and I wondered how Peter had driven the 45 minutes from Sherman Oaks to my mother’s place in Alhambra without a collision.

It seems to be a combination of unfathomable optimism and sheer stubbornness that gets Peter behind the wheel every day. Before his accident, he was hooked on cars. At 14 he bought a junky 70s Dodge Challenger and spent the next two years before getting his driver’s license fixing it up. When that conked out he acquired a 1975 Plymouth Valiant, a car he loved so much it inspired the name of his first rock band, Valiant Blue. That too died and he got a 1975 Dodge Dart. Days later he took the dive that broke him. He’s only had two vans in all these years since. He says he hasn’t formed much of an emotional bond with either. They’re just transportation now, ways of getting from one place to another. What kind of intimacy can you have with a car that you can’t get inside of to assess and repair? he asks.

As we’re on our way home from the prison there is trouble. It’s not with the technology of the van; it’s with the technology of the body. Peter is pale and frowning. I can’t tell what’s going on, but it seems he feel sick, licking his lips and swallowing like he’s about to vomit. It’s hot in the car but he doesn’t look like he’s overheating. He’s not turning red. He’s not sweating.

Ours is no normal road trip no matter how you play it.

“Your spinal cord acts like a thermostat,” Peter explains. “And mine is broken. So when it gets really hot, my nerves don’t know to tell my body to sweat. So my body doesn’t naturally cool off. It just heats up like an oven. It’s pretty dangerous. I can just have a heatstroke.”

“So that’s what is happening now?” I ask. Yet again I’m stupidly waiting for him to look at me, lend just a glance of reassurance, but of course there is none.

“Just keep your eyes out for the next exit,” he says.

At his request, I pour the rest of the water on his head and down his shirt. It is a two-fold feeling to tend so intimately to a stranger’s body, to view it as mere machinery in need of repair. I’m reluctant to look as I pluck his shirt and expose the white of his back, not wanting to see anything I shouldn’t see, but at the same time I am comforted by the blunt honesty of the interaction. It feels expressive of some truth between us. Ours is no normal road trip no matter how you play it. A quadriplegic man that probably shouldn’t drive for more than 20 minutes at a time because of the strain it puts on his surgically wired neck, is taking a woman he met on the Internet to visit her father in prison.

“This is helping,” Peter says as I empty out the bottle. The water trickles down his spine and I wonder where its sentience begins and where it ends.

Soon Peter is dripping with warm Poland Spring. His eyes look more alert, his face relieved. We pass the rest of the miles until the next exit in the companionable silence of old friends.

“Okay,” he says when we near the off ramp. “Could you please check?”

“Yup,” I say. I stick my head out the window, craning my neck to look back. Cars zip past us. The traffic is thick and greedy, and there’s no sign of a clearing. I am nervous and getting more so as my thoughts chime in loud and demanding: What if you don’t make the next exit? What if Peter starts to overheat again? What if he never stopped overheating and his body temperature is slowly rising, about to burst?

I don’t know! That is all I can think in response to the interrogation in my mind. I want to give up but I don’t know how to do that.

“What if no one lets us over?” I ask Peter. More questions unload and then I remember an exchange Peter and I shared that morning when I’d knocked over my purse on the floor of the van and its contents had spilled. As I crouched down feeling blindly around I wondered what he would do in such a situation, and asked him as much.

“Well, unfortunately,” he said with a sigh, “I’ll have to ask someone to help me out.”

“And what if there’s no one to help?” I challenged.

“I wait,” he said. “I wait for someone to help.”

He appeared thoughtful, as though pondering a hypothetical universe where there’s no one to help out, no love or compassion or goodness at all, a universe I felt I lived in since my dad was taken away.

“What if you’re all alone and there’s nothing you can do and there’s really no one to help you? There’s no one in the world. It’s just you.”

I expected Peter to chuckle at this bleak world I was insisting upon but he took me seriously. “Well,” he says. “Then that’s it. Then I just let it be. I just leave it as it is. But that never happens. There’s always someone to help eventually, and hopefully I can help them somehow, too.”

We still have a little stretch of road remaining. Desperate, I stick my arm out and wave it around, indicating an urgency to change lanes. The driver approaching on our right immediately slows down, letting us in without hesitation. I wonder why I didn’t do that before. It was so easy. A little pathetic-looking maybe, but who cares?

Within seconds we’re gliding down the off ramp. I see the giant McDonald's “M” in the near distance, a promise of icy chemical beverages.

“Thank god,” I say. “I didn’t think we’d make it.”

“Yeah,” Peter says, his laid-back tone restored. “It can get intense out here.”

Aside from the van, there’s little technology in Peter’s life that isn’t in mine.

Peter and I have kept in touch regularly since that day. Recently, for the first time, we chatted over Skype. I’m always disoriented when Skyping with someone for the first time. Here we are thousands of miles apart from each other and we’re looking into one another’s bedrooms, our respective realities pushed up against one another by virtue of a computer screen. I am distracted by the books in the background, the crumpled tissue on the nightstand, the bed so tidy except for the sheet hanging low on one side, inches past the comforter. It takes me a few moments to stop leering at Peter’s surroundings and just talk.

It is on Skype that Peter shows me how he brushes his teeth—with a device that clamps onto his wrist. It’s no more sophisticated than a plastic cup holder. He shows me how he signs a check with his teeth, his signature exactly the same as it was when he was able to write manually, “which goes to show you it’s all in your brain,” he says.

Aside from the van, there’s little technology in Peter’s life that isn’t in mine: the Internet, GPS, auto-dictation. And the van isn’t exactly cutting-edge technology either. Though it sports incredible customization that lets a quadriplegic drive it, it’s essentially a stripped-down cargo van with a series of locks and straps—and a defective substitute for the traditional car, the kind Peter was able to work on and form a bond with and name a band after.

When asked what technology would really help benefit his life as a disabled person, Peter is quick to answer: a stem cell injection. Stem cell therapy is a new field of research, but early studies suggest that injecting stem cells into patients with spinal cord injuries could help them regain some function. Unfortunately, Peter explains, it’s not easy to come by, particularly not when you’ve been living so long with an injury.

“Most of the stem cell research is geared toward people who are newly injured,” Peter says. “The more time you have, the less chance it has at being effective.”

But there are always new clinical trials popping up that Peter is hopeful to participate in. Recently he heard about one testing robotic gloves. “Now that is something I would want to be a part of,” he says. “That is technology.”

Most Popular

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts.

The most frequently cited examples of the left-wing war on free speech are the protests against right-wing speakers that occur on elite college campuses, some of which have turned violent.New York’s Jonathan Chait has described the protests as a “war on the liberal mind” and the “manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism—less serious than the threat from the right, but equally necessary to defeat.” Most right-wing critiques fail to make such ideological distinctions, and are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.

A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to statethe obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest for 2017, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17. The Grand Prize Winner will receive $10,000 (USD), publication in National Geographic Magazine and a feature on National Geographic’s Instagram account. The folks at National Geographic were, once more, kind enough to let me choose among the contest entries so far for display here. The captions below were written by the individual photographers, and lightly edited for style.

What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power.

That’s the case in the debate over North Korea. On Monday, The New York Timesdeclared that “the United States has repeatedly suggested in recent months” that it “could threaten pre-emptive military action” against North Korea. On Sunday, The Washington Post—after asking Americans whether they would “support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets” in order “to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons”—announced that “Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike.” Citing the Post’s findings, The New York Times the same day reported that Americans are “deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike” that Trump “has seemed eager to threaten.”

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy sparred with Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar on CNN hours after their bill dismantling Obamacare appeared to collapse.

Ordinarily, you debate to stave off defeat. But for Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy on Monday night, the defeat came first.

By the time the two GOP senators stepped on CNN’s stage Monday night for a prime-time debate over their health-care proposal, they knew they had already lost.

A few hours earlier, Senator Susan Collins became the third Republican to formally reject the pair’s legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, effectively killing its chances for passage through the Senate this week. Graham and Cassidy had hoped to use the forum to make a closing argument for their plan, and to line it up against Senator Bernie Sanders and his call for a single-payer, “Medicare-for-All” health-care system. Instead, the two senators found themselves defending a proposal that was no less hypothetical—and probably much less popular—than Sanders’s supposed liberal fantasy.